Country Diary: Wenlock Edge

The darker the sky, the brighter the moon and, as it filled to bursting with brilliance, the clouds covered the havoc it wrought above; below, the biggest house spider ever ran across the moonlit window. Before dark, on the twisting lanes, I had walked towards what looked at first like smoke, then low mist. When I reached the spot it was grave-cold but there was only a tall hazel hedge, the ground littered with nuts cracked by squirrels and behind it the sound of lambs in the field butting metal feeders while gaggles of Canada geese paced quietly, waiting for gleanings.

As a harvest moon hauled above the north-east into the purple featherings of sunset I felt the impulse to go where I shouldn't. I let myself through a clanging gate, where the big machines had been, into a field of oats – purple-stemmed and golden-seeded – that smelled of warm barns dry as moths. The path was an old road, no more than tyre tracks but once a way to somewhere now forgotten. In a small copse my trespass was betrayed by a jay and a pair of buzzards that lifted from the trees and at a distance made that sound cats would make if they could whistle in the sky. I followed a dark hedge that skirted the edge of the somewhere now lost because a wedge of light shone through it like an open doorway.

When I reached that spot, a 20-metre section of hedge had been bulldozed out to get the big machines through. The hedgebank and ditch, remains of an ancient earthwork, held small fragments of pottery, lime mortar and tile among the broken roots. I walked through this new feature of the landscape because the sun was setting behind the hanging woods, because bats flicked across the stubble field, because a startled deer ran in the opposite direction, because the violence of its creation called for a response.